A wafer, also called a slice or substrate, refers to a thin slice of semiconductor material, such as silicon, used in electronics for the fabrication of integrated circuit (IC) chips and in photovoltaics for wafer-based solar cells. The wafer serves as the substrate for microelectronic devices built in and over the wafer and undergoes microfabrication process stages such as doping or ion implantation, etching, deposition of various materials and photolithographic patterning.
Wafer dicing (or simply dicing) is the process by which die are separated from a wafer of semiconductor following the processing of the wafer. The dicing process can involve scribing and breaking, mechanical sawing (normally with a machine called a dicing saw) or laser cutting. Methods for dicing are automated to ensure precision and accuracy. Following the dicing process the individual silicon chips are encapsulated into chip carriers which are then suitable for use in building electronic devices such as computers, etc.
During dicing, wafers are adhered to a dicing tape which has a sticky backing that holds the wafer on a thin sheet metal frame, which is sometimes referred to as a flex frame. Dicing tape has different properties depending on the dicing application. Once a wafer has been diced, the pieces left on the dicing tape are referred to as die, dice or dies. Each will be packaged in a suitable package or placed directly on a printed circuit board substrate as a “bare die”. Once a wafer has been diced, the die will stay on the dicing tape until they are extracted by die-handling equipment, such as a die bonder or die sorter, further in the electronics assembly process.